How ad tech aims to build back better

By Ronan Shields

After a yearslong buildup, GDPR became enforceable in 2018, and to say its impact was considerable would be an understatement, with the privacy legislation still casting a shadow of doubt on European ad tech.

As an example of the disruption, workarounds included: multiple efforts to develop cookieless technologies, with these efforts still underway, and a widespread pivot to contextual offerings. Meanwhile, some just bailed out of Europe altogether.

Four years in, lessons are still being learned, with the IAB Europe’s Transparency Consent Framework — now in its second guise after Google was an early holdout — still undergoing legal scrutiny from data protection authorities in the region.

It’s a topic that was discussed at length in booths, from the conference stage and (no doubt) in the bars surrounding Koelnmesse last week, as the first in-person Dmexco conference since the Covid-19 outbreak was hosted in Germany earlier this month.

Stumbling block

Discussing the prospects of TFC 2.0, multiple sources, who requested anonymity given the politics involved in developing a cross-industry solution, hinted how conversations with marketers themselves (i.e. those with first-party relationships) indicate that the industry’s self-regulatory GDPR solution may require a rethink.

Philippa Snare, svp, EMEA, at The Trade Desk, told Digiday how the demand-side platform was working with both the IAB Europe and IAB Tech Lab toward a solution. “I don’t know if that requires a really strong unified solution,” she said in a veiled reference to Unified ID 2.0, “that’s managed by the industry and usurps the need for a consent framework?”

On several different fronts, Europe has proven a stumbling block for industry efforts to forge a path forward in the cookieless future with Google’s Privacy Sandbox, and even UID 2.0 frustrated in the region.

EUID…brought to you by TTD, and everybody else

GDPR has been the source of umbrage for projects’ respective backers, with The Trade Desk announcing a partnership with LiveRamp earlier this year to get its efforts in the region off the ground in a tie-up that has been labeled EUID.

Based on LiveRamp’s Authenticated Traffic Solution, EUID will attempt to negotiate the specifics of GDPR. This means that advertisers and publishers that sign up to the standard can transact on either EUID or RampID (both will be interoperable) within The Trade Desk’s DSP.

Snare told Digiday that while GDPR does “create an issue” for EUID’s rollout, she is confident it will be market-ready in 2023. “We’re already in alpha, we’ll be in beta as quickly as we can after that,” she said, speaking on the Dmexco floor. “I just don’t know when the formal release is.”

Separate sources hinted that further partnerships are in hand, but present contractual restrictions prevent The Trade Desk et al. from publicly disclosing the names of participants. Although, Snare did tell Digiday the company is working with “customers that have big CRM databases where we can start flushing data through the pipes, and checking out whether the tech works.”

One such …read more

Source:: Digiday